


Hereafter

by BoxesOFoxes



Category: Among Us (Video Game)
Genre: Characters are ghosts, Death, Sad with a Happy Ending, Trigger Warning: Brief Attempted Sexual Assault, graphic depictions of murder, trigger warning: suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:27:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28728852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BoxesOFoxes/pseuds/BoxesOFoxes
Summary: As the amount of living crewmates shrank, the amount of ghosts watching helpless and unable to stop the impostor from killing off their crewmates grew.
Kudos: 9





	Hereafter

Black had been the first one to die. She was alone when she “woke up” and had no idea what was going on, only knowing that she felt strange. She was cold and she realized she wasn’t breathing, even when she gasped for air she felt like nothing was going in. Everything seemed cloudy like she was trapped in a haze and she couldn’t make sense of anything.

Black was laying on the floor in electrical next to the vent. She couldn’t even really remember ever being in electrical. When she left the room and stood in the hallway for a bit to reorient herself, Yellow walked past her, but when she asked him what time it was he didn’t answer. Maybe he just hadn’t heard her, she thought at first, but when she continued to try to call his name he still didn’t answer. Yellow was not one for being rude and ignoring people when they spoke to him, so this was highly unusual. Maybe he was listening to music and just didn’t realize she was talking to him?

She went to find someone else, finding Blue in the medbay. “Hey, Blue,” she said. Blue didn’t answer her. “Oh come on, not you too?” Blue went about her tasks, setting up a sample for analysis while Black stood just behind her. “Blue, please talk to me!” Still no answer. Black slowly started going hysterical. “Why won’t anyone talk to me?”

She tried to grab her and force her to acknowledge her, but her hand went right through her. Blue suddenly shivered violently upon impact with the touch. “Goddamn air conditioning is up too high again,” she complained.

Suddenly Black could remember what had happened as it all seemed to flood back into her mind at once. She was alone in electrical doing all her tasks. Something had come out of the vent and smashed her head in on the side of the generator. Black ran back to the room and found her own body laying there, blood pooling from her caved in and shattered helmet. She started screaming, but no one could hear her.

She didn’t know how long she stared at her own cooling body before someone finally found it, Green coming to check why it was taking her so long to finish her tasks when hers were the only ones in the log not flagged as complete for the day. He began throwing up and immediately got his husband, and his husband alerted the rest of the crew.

Her crewmates had been frantic in their attempts to understand what had happened. They didn’t know who could have done this. Hell, Black didn’t know who could have done this. She hadn’t seen her killer, only felt the hand on the back of her skull before it was being repeatedly bashed against the generator. She couldn’t think of anyone on the crew that she would have made an enemy of. She had always been so nice to everyone. Did she secretly anger someone? Did she do something wrong?

Black was not alone in death for long. The very next day Red joined her. He was the biggest guy on the crew and had the most combat experience of anyone here having previously been a Space Marine, so he’d actually been able to put up a fight against whoever had killed him, causing part of the killer to be torn off and left behind at the scene of the crime.

“Fuck,” Red said when he realized he was dead, his head turned around so forcefully that it had almost been twisted completely off. “Fuck! This can’t be happening!”

“Red, calm down. What’s the last thing you remember?” Black asked him. She hoped he would have enough information to help her make sense of her own demise.

“I can’t be seeing you right now! You’re dead! That means I’m dead! But...Purple!” He started punching walls, something that normally would have left dents under his immense strength but which now left no harm at all. “Goddammit!”

“Red. Tell me what you remember. Who killed you?”

“It was Pink,” Red said as he gathered himself together enough for coherency. “Pink is an impostor.”

“Shit. That means everyone is in danger,” Black said. At least now she knew that she had not in fact made an enemy of someone since impostors mostly seemed to target randomly.

“Yeah, no shit! Purple is in danger and I can’t protect her!”

Black had since learned due to her newfound ability to wander the ship unheeded and unseen that Red and Purple were secretly sleeping together every night. She had thought this was adorable, especially due to their massive height difference with Red being twice her size since he was the tallest member of the crew while she was the shortest, and the fact that Red had a tendency to be loud and bombastic while Purple was quiet and soft spoken. Who would have thought those two of all people would have fallen in love with each other?

Now that Red was gone Purple was vulnerable and that was the thing he worried about the most in the world. Black was forced to watch as Red desperately tried to get Purple’s attention, ignoring Black as she insisted that Purple couldn’t hear him. He tried to comfort her when his body was found and she sobbed over the corpse, fighting off any attempts by the other crewmates to pull her away. Red was enraged when he saw Pink moving in on her, trying to reassure her that everything was okay, knowing that he was getting some sick thrill out of making her think he was her friend when in fact he had just murdered the love of her life a few hours ago.

It didn’t stop there. The next few days Pink began to target her, rubbing her shoulders, telling her things that she wanted to hear, comforting her when she felt there was no one else in the world to turn to while she grieved. Red had to tell her. He needed to do something. He felt immense rage every minute he watched Pink touch her, trying to take advantage of her grief to get her to love him so he could do who knows what the hell he had planned to her, trick her into defending him, something far worse than death that Red didn’t want to think about, who the hell knew?

“We can’t talk to them, Red. I’m sorry. I already tried everything,” Black said.

“No we didn’t,” he shook his head. “I saw this in a movie. Maybe it’ll actually work.”

That night Pink insisted on being in the room with Purple while she cried herself to sleep, convincing her that he was worried for her wellbeing and didn’t want her to be alone. Red was infuriated that she allowed him, not at her, but at Pink for allowing her to think that he was a safe person and a source of comfort while she was emotionally compromised. Several times he tried to attack Pink knowing that it was no use and he couldn’t harm him when he saw the impostor touch her. When she was finally asleep, Pink leered at her, running hands up and down her sides, across her chest, all lacking the love and gentleness that Red had used when touching her and instead seeming slimy and predatory.

Red almost started sobbing when the impostor started reaching towards her with outstretching tentacles and getting into the bed with her and felt instant relief when Pink started swearing as the voice in his comms informed him that White and Green wanted to talk to him about the quality of work, or lack thereof, he was putting into his tasks, and would he please report to admin? Red had no doubts he was about to watch Purple get hurt and he knew that he needed to act now to prevent that from happening.

“Purple?” Red climbed in next to her so he could be closer to her and watched as her breath started to become visible as his attempts to interact with her brought a chill to the room. “Baby, can you hear me?”

“Red?” Purple muttered in her sleep.

Red almost felt relief. Could she actually hear him? “I love you,” he told her.

“I love you too,” she replied. She _could_ hear him.

“Purple, you have to listen to me. Pink is the impostor. He’s trying to hurt you. You need to stay away from him and warn the others.”

“Pink,” she mumbled.

“Yes! He’s the impostor! Pink killed me! Don’t let him near you!”

“It’s cold in here,” she said.

Red kissed her and for a brief moment he was actually able to do so without passing through her, but the action took a lot out of him and left him feeling weak afterwards. “Please stay safe, baby. I love you,” he told her again.

He stood over her, watching her sleep, knowing that he had done about all he could have done to help her. Black put a hand on his shoulder, knowing how much this was hurting him to be forced to watch.

The next day he was devastated when Purple once more went to Pink for comfort. “What’s wrong, Purple?” he asked her when he saw her. He was putting on his friendly everyman persona, one that Black and Red had both fallen for just like everyone else but now knew to be a lie.

“I had a dream last night. Red was talking to me,” she said.

“What did he say?”

“He told me he loved me.”

“Purple, get out of there!” Red screamed, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him.

“Seems like your brain is just telling you what you wanted to hear,” Pink stated.

“Maybe,” she agreed. “But I could have sworn it felt like he was actually there.”

“Stop talking to him! Purple!”

“Did he say anything else?” Purple looked nervous. “Ah. It was one of _those_ kinds of dreams, huh?”

“No, it’s not like that,” she replied. “He just uh...told me that you were an impostor.”

_Fuck, why did she tell him that?_

Both Black and Red could see the moment where Pink’s helmet-hidden expression went from a smile to becoming completely neutral while Purple remained oblivious. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just my subconscious feeling guilty because I’ve been hanging out with you so soon after Red died and it’s making up excuses for why I shouldn’t be near you.” She started crying once more. “I just miss him so much.”

“Hey, come here. It’ll be okay,” Pink said. He slowly started moving towards her.

Black saw him reach into one of his utility pouches and covertly withdraw something shiny. “Oh my god, he’s got a knife!”

“PURPLE!” Red screamed.

“I don’t...maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe my brain is trying to tell me something,” Purple shook her head.

“Tell you something like what, that I’m an impostor?” Pink asked. He laughed. “Now why would it do that?”

“I don’t know, Pink. I’ve been a mess the last few days.” Purple realized how close he was getting to her. “What’s in your hand?” She started to back up. “Pink?”

Red was forced to watch his girlfriend screaming and desperately trying to push Pink away while he repeatedly stabbed her in the head, face, and chest. He stabbed her with enough force that the knife got lodged inside of her chest and the handle broke off. The impostor shoved her corpse to the ground and callously gave it a kick.

“Stupid bitch. Now you got blood all over me,” he said before moving to the vent and slinking away to wash himself off before anyone saw him like that.

Red didn’t want to be reunited with Purple this way. He knelt beside her on the floor, combing fingers through her hair, watching her about to come undone when she realized what had just happened and who had done it to her. He wiped tears off her face and wordlessly picked her up and carried her to another room and Black took that to mean they didn’t want to be disturbed. Apparently they could still have sex as ghosts because she could hear them both desperately trying to seek comfort from each other in the only way their grief stricken minds could think of, which just ended in a lot of sobbing and holding each other afterwards as reality finally hit them that they were both actually dead and Pink had murdered them.

When Purple’s body was found a meeting was finally called. Pink had already scrubbed every bit of blood off of himself, leaving no evidence that he had been the killer. The ghosts all stood around him glaring daggers at him and Cyan commented that the room felt colder than normal.

“It’s Pink!” Red shouted.

“Red, they can’t hear you,” Black once more reminded him while they watched the meeting take place.

“Maybe it was Blue,” Pink suggested.

“I beg your pardon?” Blue asked.

“It’s Pink!” Red shouted again.

“She was the one who found both Red and Purple’s bodies. You don’t think that’s suspicious?”

“Maybe she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Green pointed out. “Happens to the best of us. I mean I’m the one that found Black.”

“It’s Pink!” This time Purple shouted alongside him.

“She was talking to Purple just before she died too. Yellow saw her, right?”

Yellow looked nervous as he admitted, “I did.”

“I was asking her if she was okay!” Blue defended herself. “She hadn’t been herself since Red died!”

“Blue never hurt me! Leave her alone!” Purple said with tears stinging her eyes.

“It’s fucking Pink!” Red shouted.

“Can we all just calm down and admit that we don’t know yet who did it?” Brown pleaded. “We’ll figure this out. We don’t want to just point fingers and accuse people on flimsy evidence.”

“Brown’s right. I suggest we gather more evidence first before we condemn anyone,” White agreed.

“And allow her to keep killing people?” Pink said angrily. “What if I’m next? What if it’s you?”

“You fucking monster,” Red said through his teeth.

“Alright, so we agree that this meeting is adjourned?” Green asked.

“Fuck!” Red screamed as he punched the cafeteria table. He suddenly felt that familiar weak feeling of having used too much of whatever energy was keeping him in this plane of existence between life and death and noticed everyone at the table looking around at each other when it seemingly shook on its own.

Green was next. He lingered in the cafeteria by himself for too long while everyone else had gone to do their tasks. He should have known better than to be alone. His husband, Brown, should have stayed with him. He seemed to be running under some logic that if you were alone there was no one around to kill you without realizing that this also meant that there was no one around to save you if you suddenly found yourself not so alone anymore.

“Hey, Pink. What do you need?” Green asked when he heard the door open.

Pink started looking around and listening for anyone who might be nearby. He smiled when he realized they were currently isolated. “Nothing. I’m just bored.”

“Go do your tasks if you’re so bored then,” Green pointed out. “And make sure you do them properly this time. I swear you’re the only one who has no idea how to properly wire the lights. It’s almost like you’re colorblind or something.”

“Green, no!” Purple said faintly.

“Or something,” Pink shrugged.

Green gathered up some trash left on the table and started walking to the compactor. Pink followed him closely behind.

“Green, run!” Red shouted. Black had long ago given up attempting to shout at her crewmates. She had resigned herself to the fact that there was no point anymore when they couldn’t even hear her.

“Pink, what are you doing?” Green asked when he felt the impostor standing too close for comfort. “Pink?” He felt tentacles on him and screamed, “FUCK!” as he was grappled and lifted off the ground.

Pink opened the trash compactor and forced him in headfirst, a task which wasn’t easy as he struggled to avoid being forced upside down into the tight and narrow passage. The ghosts had to watch helplessly knowing they couldn’t do a damn thing as the impostor shut it again and stood there just long enough to allow Green to dwell in terror in the dark, cramped box before he pushed the button. Red held and tried to comfort Purple as they all tried to drown out the sounds of their friend’s agonized screams and cracking bones as he was slowly crushed to death. They weren’t sure what was worse, the screams, or the eventual silence when it was over.

Pink pulled it open just enough to peek in at his handiwork and smiled before walking away.

They were still trying to console Green’s traumatized ghost about his horrible death when they heard the approaching footsteps. Green felt his heart sink when he saw it was his husband making a beeline for the trash compactor with a bag of garbage he was supposed to throw out. His tasks that day had included the garbage, something Pink knew because he had asked him about it.

“No! Baby, please don’t look inside!” Green pleaded. He was the absolute last person he wanted finding his mangled corpse.

“I’m sorry, Green. He can’t hear you,” Purple told him.

Green ignored them and tried to grab Brown to physically stop him from looking inside. He only succeeded in making him pause a moment as he shivered and commented on the temperature of the room being really cold all of a sudden. Brown looked at the red goop that was running down the front of the compactor suspiciously and opened it, peering inside. His screams could be heard from several rooms away.

Green reacted much as Red had to Purple and followed Brown like a lost puppy, watching him as he laid sobbing on one of the beds of the medbay, curled up in the fetal position as he was forced to relive the memory of finding his partner horrifically mangled and crushed playing over and over in his mind. Blue gave him a bottle of tranquilizers to help him sleep when she cleared him to leave under the recommendation that he forwent any tasks for a few days and just focused on getting some sleep.

That night his husband’s ghost sat in his bed next to him with his face buried in his hands in grief as Brown downed the entire bottle of tranquilizers and washed it down with a bottle of Green’s favorite brand of beer. When Brown opened his eyes again he at first thought it hadn’t worked and was about to lament the fact that he had still woken up until he saw Green overtop of him.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” Green asked him, his voice sounding hurt. They held each other and cried for what felt like an eternity while the other ghosts gave them their privacy.

The only ones left now were Blue, Yellow, Cyan, White, and of course Pink, with half the crew left deceased. Pink once more stirred up suspicion in Blue after Brown’s suicide was discovered. “Blue, why did you give him an entire bottle of tranqs when you knew he was suicidal?”

“She didn’t know. I said everything I could to make her think I was going to be okay,” Brown said. Green wrapped an arm around him and pulled him into a tight embrace.

“I didn’t think he would kill himself!” Blue said. She had been wracked with grief over knowing that her attempts to help Brown had led to his death. “I did the same thing with Purple and she didn’t kill herself!”

“She didn’t have a chance to. You killed her first!” Pink accused.

“Please stop yelling,” Yellow pleaded. His best friend, Cyan, wrapped an arm around his shoulder and pulled him closer to comfort him as the argument only became more heated and set off his anxiety.

“Don’t you find it suspicious that the vent in electrical is also connected to the one in the medbay?” Pink pointed out. “Your entire alibi the night that Black died was that you never left the room, but maybe you did and just no one saw you!”

“That means nothing! That vent also connects to security! No one was in security, so the impostor could have slipped in that way!” Blue shouted back.

“How would you have known that no one was in security?” Pink asked.

“Because I..well...no one said they were there,” Blue stuttered.

“Or maybe because you also vented to security to look for more victims.”

“I think maybe you’re the impostor!” Blue accused. “You’re the only one who’s accusing people!”

“Excuse me?” Pink asked.

“I think the real reason you want me gone is because you know I’ve been studying that bit of you that Red tore off in his fight with you!”

“Good. I hope it was your dick,” Black said, which admittedly earned a small chuckle out of Red at least.

“Unless that’s part of your cover to keep the sample away from us and you’re not actually studying it! And what about your tasks? You haven’t been doing them!”

“I have been giving autopsies to the bodies of my friends for days! I have no emotional energy left to do them!”

“Please stop yelling!” Yellow interrupted. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” He was shaking and Cyan was struggling to keep him calm. Yellow had an anxiety disorder, so all of the recent fighting and the threat of death was really getting to him and he was constantly having nervous breakdowns as a result.

“Alright. Let’s put this to a vote,” White said as he sighed regretfully.

Blue was devastated when the results came back. White was the only one who defended her, and even then he only did so because they’d been growing closer these past few months and he just couldn’t bring himself to believe she was a monster. He wouldn’t even look her in the eyes as they dragged her to the airlock, just shook his head and wished that his crewmates could have defended her too.

“I love you,” he said to her as the airlock sealed and she awaited her death.

Blue refused to talk to the other ghosts at first, refused to acknowledge she was dead, her suffocated body floating through space, and they watched her as she ignored them and went about doing her tasks as though she were still alive, despite the fact that every interaction with the environment was physically draining on her due to the amount of energy she needed to manipulate things.

Brown was the first one to get her to acknowledge that they existed. “Are you mad at me because I killed myself?” he asked.

Blue finally looked at him and immediately broke down into tears. She pulled him into a hug. “I shouldn’t have released you so soon. I had no idea you were thinking of…”

“I didn’t want you to know because I knew you’d stop me,” he replied. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”

“We would have defended you if we were still alive, Blue,” Green said. “We never suspected you even before knowing that Pink was the impostor.” He knew it was an empty comfort given that it was too late and they were all dead, but he hoped it brought her some peace knowing that not everyone had been against her.

Pink slowed down and it was a week before his bloodlust got the better of him again. It was clear why he had stopped. Make them think that Blue really was the impostor. Make them think they were safe. Make them put their guard down so that when he finally did kill them all they would realize their mistake, that they had murdered one of their innocent crewmates and now they were about to suffer too.

Despite all of his thought out planning and carefulness up to this point, Pink made a fatal mistake. He had thought that he and Yellow were alone as he grappled him in storage and lifted him in the air, a tentacle tightening around his throat so he couldn’t scream for help. The ghosts knew they couldn’t sit around and do nothing anymore while their living crewmates dwindled.

Both Red and Blue had managed to interact with the environment, even if it had hurt them in the end. They quickly came up with a plan, working together to make a racket and draw attention by picking up and throwing one of the crates as hard as they could against the wall, an action that had startled even Pink as he tried to figure out just what the hell had caused a box to get hurled across the room. They briefly debated throwing it at Pink first, but didn’t want to risk hitting Yellow instead.

Cyan had come to see what the noise was, and when he saw Yellow hoisted up in the air, tears running down his face as he struggled to breathe, a decidedly monstrous looking Pink looking at Cyan in shock, he immediately ran forward, jumping on him and forcing him to drop his friend. Cyan bought him enough time to run off and alert White, but unfortunately his strength did not match Red’s. Pink effortlessly pinned him to the ground, tentacles wrapped around his wrists and holding them over his head, leaving his abdomen exposed for when the impostor started gutting him with foot long claws.

Yellow returned with White in tow, and White had a flamethrower. He’d always been good at tinkering and had been making one from random parts that he had scavenged from around the ship over the last couple of days in suspicion that Blue was not the impostor. Blue felt pride in knowing that her notes were responsible for this as White had gone through her things after her death and had taken notice of her scribblings that the sample of impostor tentacle that she had reacted negatively to fire.

They both got Pink to move towards the airlock. A few times he tried to dive into a vent or an open doorway and got hit with a blast of heat as a result. Fire indeed was effective because he shrieked and thrashed as tentacles burned up and fell off. By the time they got him into the airlock his pink body had turned mostly black and crispy and one of his arms had joined his tentacles on the floor in a pile of charcoal.

“Go fuck yourself, Pink,” Red said, even though he knew he couldn’t hear him, as White cycled the airlock.

“That’s for what you did to Blue, you fucking asshole!” White screamed at him as he watched him get sucked into space. Blue also felt a small amount of comfort at seeing him angry on her behalf.

Cyan was already waiting for them when the ghosts returned to the storage room. He looked around at all of his fallen crewmates, wondering if he was dreaming, and then when he saw his own body laying there, intestines torn out, blood pooling around it, it sank in.

“Is Yellow okay?” he asked through his tears.

“Yellow’s okay,” Blue told him. “You saved him, Cyan.”

“I killed you,” he said regretfully.

“Pink killed me, not you. I’m not angry. I forgive you for voting against me,” she reassured him.

“Pink’s dead?”

“We got him,” Red replied.

It was Cyan’s turn to find out how surreal it was to attend your own funeral and Cyan’s heart was broken as he watched Yellow break down and fall to the ground as they spaced his best friend’s blanket wrapped corpse. At first he had tried to stop it from happening, telling White that he’d be really uncomfortable and that blanket wasn’t warm or soft enough, trying to make any excuse to prolong it until White finally put his hands on his shoulders and told him, “Yellow, he’s gone.”

“I know,” he said helplessly. He had no idea that Cyan was standing right next to him, wanting nothing more than to pull him into a hug.

White and Yellow were alone now. The two refused to leave each other’s side, even sleeping in the same bed because they were too scared to be alone when they inevitably woke with a nightmare.

They couldn’t figure out why the Skeld wasn’t completely breaking down with only a crew of two to manage it or how all of their tasks were seemingly getting done for them, but their crewmates smiled on them and made sure the ship was running for as long as it needed until they reached their destination or were rescued by another passing ship.

They saw Pink a few times. The crew all had each other for comfort in their deaths but Pink knew he was alone. He was the only impostor, alive or dead, and none of them would want to talk to him after what he had done to all of them. Several times he had tried to get closer, hoping they would forgive him, only for Red to charge after him and chase him off, making an inhuman squealing sound as he ran away on all fours knowing that he couldn’t actually fight back or hurt them anymore. Eventually he gave up and resigned himself to being lonely for the rest of his eternity, slinking off inside of the vents where they wouldn’t have to see him, but they would sometimes hear him sniffling. It was the least that he deserved for what he did, they all thought.

Sometimes at night Cyan would crawl in next to Yellow and talk to him while he slept the way that Red had told him would work. Over the weeks Yellow started to feel comfort in sleeping, reducing his anxiety over the action. He had fewer nightmares and when he talked to White in the mornings about it he insisted it was like he was actually talking to Cyan and not just dreaming it. White seemed to be at peace because Yellow was finally at peace. Soon Yellow didn’t even need White sleeping in the same bed as him anymore, though he still didn’t want to be completely alone, and the two had come up with a solution in the form of White dragging his mattress into Yellow’s room and sleeping on his floor.

“Do you think they’ll be okay when we finally go?” Cyan asked.

His friends watched their two surviving crewmates. They were laughing again, sharing memories of their fallen friends, and Yellow had pulled out his tablet and was looking through photos he’d taken with Cyan, and though the memories were bittersweet and sometimes brought tears, they were ultimately happier. White had made them waffles, the first actual food they had that didn’t come out of a can in weeks.

White suddenly got quiet and looked at his tablet when he got an alert. Their SOS had finally been answered and a freighter was headed their way to help. They were going home...

“I think they’ll be fine, Cyan,” Red said. He held his girlfriend in his lap and gave her a kiss. Brown and Green were sitting side by side on one of the tables, Green’s hand on Brown’s thigh and Brown’s head on his husband’s shoulder. Blue and Black were both laughing over a shared joke. “I think we’re all going to be fine.”

**Author's Note:**

> I’m deathly terrified of trash compactors because getting crushed to death is a fear I legit suffer from, so I think of all the deaths I wrote in this fic, Green’s was the one that actually affected me the most.


End file.
